Have We Turned the Corner on Higher Ed?
Conservatives’ trust in higher education has plummeted since 2015, and for good reason. A deluge of canceled speakers, tent encampments, DEI depravity, grade inflation, and out-of-control borrowing has marked the culmination of decades of institutional rot that has turned brand-name campuses into bastions of left-wing ideology.
This has made the right’s recent counteroffensive truly remarkable. This spring, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a profile of Harvey C. Mansfield, Harvard University’s iconic conservative professor of government. It observed: “Mansfield spent six decades championing lost causes. At 94, he’s suddenly winning.”
Big, if true.
Have we turned the corner on higher ed? The signs are certainly auspicious.
Take grade inflation, a long-standing preoccupation of Mansfield’s. For the past decade, more than 80 percent of undergraduate grades at Harvard College have been A’s or A minuses. This May, Harvard’s faculty voted to impose a 20 percent cap on A’s awarded in each course. Dean Amanda Claybaugh predicted that the result would “strengthen the academic culture of Harvard” and might “encourage other institutions to confront” the problem of grade inflation with “rigor and courage.”
